What Omnichannel Brings to Collaboration and Customer Care

My
last few posts have focused on customer care, mainly to show an evolution unfolding around what drives value in the contact center, and how collaboration plays a central role. There’s actually a strong connection between the way businesses view the contact center and the communications technologies used, with omnichannel being the latest iteration. I don’t normally write here about the contact center space, but omnichannel represents a big step forward for the value of collaboration in an area not normally considered by decision-makers.

To clarify that, omnichannel must first be understood, not just in its own right, but relative to a related term, multichannel. The latter has been with us much longer, and refers to the ability to communicate using multiple channels, either in serial fashion or concurrently. These options have been available since the advent of broadband, which has given rise to digital modes for all the channels we use to communicate, such as voice, video, Web chat, IM, messaging/SMS, email and even fax.

When all of these can be supported over a common network – IP – multichannel communication becomes possible. The key characteristic is that all of these can occur using the same interface, as opposed to switching modes for each one, such as going to the fax machine for fax, using the desk phone for telephony, and using the PC for IM. In that environment, switching among these modes isn’t very practical, but with IP, multichannel becomes a native capability.

Multichannel helps agents, but is just one step forward

While this represents progress, it still has inherent limitations. Multichannel definitely makes it easier to manage multiple modes to suit the needs of each communications session, but that’s all there is. In other words, the technology does little more than make it easy to communicate across modes, but it doesn’t impact the content of that communication, and nor does it provide any context. In other words, it’s a passive capability where each mode exists in a vacuum, but no richness is added to the experience, and that’s where omnichannel takes things to another level.

That said, multichannel has become the norm both inside and outside the contact center. Not only do all employees communicate this way – to varying degrees – but so do your customers, and that’s why this series is being written. Aside from the fact that IP makes it possible to manage all your communications modes in one place, it’s far more flexible than legacy technology. As a result, the utilization of communications applications is highly user-driven, and with that, customers bring higher expectations when engaging with the contact center.

Today, customers freely switch among modes when communicating, and when agents can’t keep pace, this introduces a new level of tension beyond the issue they’re inquiring about. When this happens, small problems compound into larger problems, placing even more pressure on agents to somehow find a resolution. Given how most contact centers face constraints to modernize their legacy systems, they’ll be lucky to have multichannel, and all this does is give agents more options to communicate based on customer preferences. Unfortunately, this isn’t the end game, as they need better collaboration capabilities beyond this to actually take action and provide an effective customer experience.

This challenge - improving customer experience - is emerging now as a top strategic priority for management, which I covered in an earlier series. Multichannel alone doesn’t provide that outcome, and this is where a shift is needed to the next level in customer service – omnichannel. In much the same way that the terms collaboration and communication are used interchangeably, the same applies here, and the differences must be understood if agents are to reach a level playing field with customers.

Omnichannel is that next step forward

Having reviewed multichannel herein, I’ll now compare this against omnichannel, especially with the above examples as reference points. To clarify, multichannel is very much about communication, whereas omnichannel has more to do with collaboration. Multichannel allows agents to communicate more easily with customers, but omnichannel takes things further by providing a context-based framework for real-time collaboration to drive better outcomes.

While agents don’t always have to collaborate to solve customer problems, they must increasingly rely on resources beyond their immediate domain to do so. Sometimes they’ll just need to collaborate with other people – supervisors, fellow agents or experts from across the organization – and other times, various forms of customer data will also be required. This is part of the collaboration process, since everyone involved during the session may need to confer around the data itself.

As such, omnichannel enables agents to draw from a broad range of resources – human and otherwise – that are relevant to the situation at hand. The technology around omnichannel is complex, but once in place, it takes customer service to another level beyond multichannel, and that’s when we start talking about customer care instead of the contact center. All of these shifts are related, and hopefully those connections will become clearer over the next few posts.